Hi, >> Besides, I'm too egoistic to write or re-write major parts >> of something when this new version isn't accepted because it >> isn't tested enough. That was the case with the "unstable" >> DOS-C version 2037
> this entire bullshit. > 2037 has been tested, and the results say 'unstable' Okay. > 2037 had some very welcome enhancements (country.sys support > comes to my mind, but there may be more). Good question - what else should be ported to stable first? > unfortunately 2037 has also a zillion of Arkady's 'optimizations'. > at least one of them made the kernel unstable. I started making a big "technical" list of what changed in which SVN revision and did indeed find a very broad mix of patch types: The country.sys support, if possible to combine with the 2036 hardcodes number/date/time format defaults for those who have no space for country.sys files, would be one of the most useful things to port back into the stable kernel. On the other hand, some other "unstable" kernel patches are clearly very experimental. Some throw in lots of debugging, others are "let me try X in a completely different way", yet others are indeed Arkady style peephole optimizations which can sacrifice readability (and maybe stability) for a few more bytes of reduced kernel size. However, most patches are not officially by Arkady but by Jeremy, who had support from Lucho. One problem is that Jeremy commited in waves where much code changed in short time and no other kernel developers had the time / wanted to review so heavy changes in such short time. I think I should post my half-done (60 of 120 commits :-)) "list of commits between 2035 stable and 2037 unstable" to one (but which?) of the mailing lists so we can discuss it: Find those patches that are easy and worth to port to 2038, those that are hard to port but very useful, those which seem to be debugging or experimental and might be worth reverting to make 2037 more stable/readable/useable/maintainable and those which scare the XYZ out of the reader and should be reviewed or reverted to get back some confidence for 2037. In addition, discussing on the list might motivate some of the readers to contribute the 2nd half of the list :-)). > not unstable as in 'linux kernel with an odd number', but > unstable as in 'do not use for production. will sometimes > surprise you' Not good. > in that case, Jeremy is to blame, as he merged Arkadys > optimizations, but never took the time to backtrace > them to a to be tested, but stable 2037. Interesting. That would also explain why the commit log sometimes has very short / vague explanations of what exactly changed in which SVN update... > feel free to re-add country.sys support to 2038 See above :-) >> (which had many features version 2036 and the upcoming >> 2038 don't have). > yes, sadly. When excluding backports from 2038 to 2037, I remember only a few... Country sys support and experimental but sometimes working WfW311 / Win3.1 386enh compatibility, something with Ctrl-Z, nicer initdisk partition display and some alternative ways to handle absence of floppy drives and disk changes in general. Also related: SHARE tuning, new SYS features (make boot sectors for OTHER operating systems... strange idea ;-)) I probably missed several goodies because as said my list-of-changes only covers half of the SVN writes yet. Commits where "too much" changed in one big blob are: 1147 Win3 related, 1023 nlsfunc country sys related, 1009 various tuning, 998 the big "initial unstable branch from Lucho and Arkady" (7/2004) which throws large amounts of changes into more than 20 files :-! I probably missed several of the too big ones, too ;-) Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R)AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today-http://p.sf.net/sfu/adobe-com _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
